1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a speech synthesizing apparatus and to a method for accepting a plurality of speech characteristic condition designating requests, and in particular, to a speech synthesizing apparatus for issuing speech requests without a need to designate all or part of conditions.
2. Description of the Related Art
Speech synthesizing apparatuses that synthesize speeches with a plurality of speech characteristics corresponding to speech characteristic parameters are known (as in Japanese Patent Laid-open Publication No.4-175046 and No.4-175049). The term speech characteristics is a general term of characteristics that depend on sex, age, individual, speech tone (average pitch frequency), pitch change amount, speech speed, accent strength, and so forth.
In addition, a speech synthesizing apparatus that accepts a plurality of speech characteristic condition designating requests and that operates in a multi-task environment or a network environment is disclosed in a technical paper by Takahashi et. al. entitled "Speech Synthesizing Software for Personal Computers", The Information Processing Society of Japan, 47-th National Convention, Vol. 2, pp. 377-378).
In the conventional speech synthesizing apparatuses, the user who issues a speech request should designate all speech characteristic conditions.
However, depending on an objective of speech synthesis, it is not necessary to strictly designate all speech characteristic conditions. For example, when a newspaper article is vocally synthesized, the speech speed of the speech characteristic conditions is important. However, other speech characteristic conditions (for example, sex and age) may not be important. In the conventional apparatuses, in such a case, all speech characteristic conditions should be individually designated.
Moreover, in the conventional speech synthesizing apparatus for accepting a plurality of speech characteristic conditions, when a plurality of speech requests are accepted, the apparatus does not determine whether or not the speech characteristic conditions of each speech request are similar to each other. Thus, the speech characteristics of several speech requests may be aurally the same or similar to each other. In this case, the user cannot identify these speech requests, thereby confusing them. For example, in a personal computer system that has a plurality of printers, when a speech "Out of Paper |" is synthesized from one printer, even if different speech characteristics are designated to each printer, the user cannot identify the printer that is "out of paper".